Are There Human Fossils in the "Wrong Place" for Evolution?

The scientific field of paleoanthropology, with its continuing discovery of more
and more evidence for human evolution, seems to strike at the heart of the
creationist interpretation of Genesis. It is not surprising, then, that
creationists would make every effort to try to debunk the growing evolutionary
tree of fossil hominids.

The creationist debunking effort is two-pronged. The first prong is to attempt
to discredit the fossil finds of paleoanthropologists such as Richard and Mary
Leakey, Donald Johanson, Tim White, F. Clark Howell, and Phillip Tobias. The
second prong is to claim that evolutionary scientists conveniently leave out
fossil hominid finds that don't fit into the evolutionary pattern. This article
will concentrate on answering the second creationist argument, responding to the
various hominid finds that creationists say upset the evolutionary chronology.

"Out of Place" Fossil Hominids

In the Handy Dandy Evolution Refuter, Robert Kofahl makes the following
statement:

- page 15 -

Fossil remains, the same or essentially the same as modern man, which were found
buried deep or in strata dated very old, have been ignored and are no longer
reported to the public. Examples are the Calaveras, Castenedolo, and Olmo
skulls. (p. 73)

In The Creation Explanation, Kofahl, with Kelly Segraves, goes into more detail.
After four pages of charts and diagrams, which include the above-mentioned three
skulls together with some accepted by modern science, the book declares:

... the Castenedolo, Olmo, and Calaveras fossils, all carefully documented, have
been relegated to dusty museum closets and forgotten by the anthropologists
because they do not fit into the accepted evolutionary scheme of human origins.
Sir Arthur Keith, British scientist and dean of anthropologists in the first
quarter of this century, in his book, The Antiquity of Man, described in great
detail the Castenedolo, Olmo, and Calaveras fossils. He told how these fossils
would have been accepted as genuine had they not so radically contradicted the
ape-to-man dogma which rules the minds of most anthropologists. (p. 125)

Scientific Creationism, edited by Henry Morris, says much the same thing.

For example, there were the Castenedolo and Olmo skulls found in Italy in 1860
and 1863, respectively. Both were identified as modern skulls and yet were found
in undisturbed Pliocene strata. The Calaveras skull was found in California in
1886, also in Pliocene deposits, and it too was a fully developed modern skull.
These were well documented at the time, but later became more or less forgotten.
(p. 177)

The Bible Science Newsletter comments:
Another example of how people react when the evidence does not agree with their
philosophical position is the treatment which the Castenedolo skull received.
This totally modern type skull was found in Pliocene strata, dated at one-half
million years. Because this discovery did not agree with preconceived ideas, it
is rarely mentioned in textbooks or other literature. (p. 5)

These creationists seem to be on to something, so let's investigate the existing
data and examine each of these finds in more detail.

The Castenedolo

The Catalog of Fossil Hominids, edited by Oakley, Campbell, and Molleson, and
published by the British Museum, states on page 235:

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In 1860, G. Ragazzoni discovered hominid skeletal fragments on the hill of
Castenedolo, but, since there was some doubt about their stratigraphical age,
they were discarded as of no importance. In 1880, G. Ragazzoni found close to
the site several hominid skulls with some associated post-cranial bones,
including an adult female calvaria, fragments of parietal and occipital bones of
an adult male, and isolated cranial fragments of a child.

This sounds impressive. Could creationists be right that these finds have been
ignored? On page 107 in the 1957 issue of the classic, Fossil Men, by Boule and
Vallois, we get our answer.

The bones from Castenedolo, near Brescia in Italy, belong to several skeletons
of men, women, and children and were found on various occasions in a shelly bed
of sand and clay, of marine origin and of Pliocene age. In 1899, the discovery
of a new human skeleton was the subject of an official report by Professor Issel,
who then observed that the various fossils from this deposit were all
impregnated with salt, with the sole exception of the human fossils.... It seems
certain that at Castenedolo we are dealing with more or less recent burials.
[Emphasis added]

This opinion was originally published before 1900. At present the Castenedolo
materials are still in their original matrix and are located in the Instituto de
Antropologia in Rome.

The investigation of the age of Castenedolo did not end with Professor Issel. As
recently as 1965, newer and more sophisticated methods were applied to these
materials. The Catalog of Fossil Hominids states: "Analysis of the bones showed
that their residual collagen (assessed by %N) is higher than that of any other
fossil bones from central and northern sites which have been tested" (p. 236).
The end result of the collagen studies demonstrated that the Castenedolo materials
were intrusive burials into the Astian clays. In 1969, the British Museum made
radiocarbon tests on the cranial materials, and the tests demonstrated that the
age was Holocene, the most recent life period (approximately twenty-five thousand
years ago), and not Pliocene.

The Olmo

"Evolutionists generally ignore modern-type skulls which have been found in
so-called ancient rock strata, because such discoveries do not fit their
theories," says the Bible Science Newsletter (p. 5). "One such skull is the Olmo
skull."

In the case of the Olmo materials, the creationists are in error from the beginning.
The Olmo skull fits perfectly into the evolutionary chronology and is a
legitimate specimen, for here we find a modern skull cap in upper-Pleistocene
gravels—exactly where it ought to be. As G. G. MacCurdy states:

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Professor Ignio Cocchi, who made the discovery in 1863 and who carefully studied
the pieces as well as the site, referred all to the Lower Quaternary. ... In
1897, Cocchi revised his opinion in regard to the Olmo cranium, referring it to
the closing phases of the Quaternary [Pleistocene], a view which is no doubt
more nearly in keeping with the facts. (p. 412)

The British Museum had developed a system and procedure for the relative dating
of dentine, antler, and bone. The Catalog of Fossil Hominids describes it in
this manner on page ix of the Introduction:

This system combines fluorine analysis with uranium estimation by radiometric
assay (expressed as equivalent urania, eU308, in parts per million) and nitrogen
determination by microchemical analysis has often proved useful when there has
been some doubt as to whether a fossil bone or tooth is contemporaneous with its
matrix, derived from an older layer, or intrusive by burial from a younger
horizon.

Based on this objective lab test of the Olmo skull, it was concluded: "Olmo 1
more probably from gravel, that is, upper Pleistocene" (p. 248). This would make
it fifty thousand to seventy-five thousand years old, placing it in the Upper
Paleolithic (Stone Age) cultural period.

The Calaveras

Although the Castenedolo find represented a simple burial in recent times and
the Olmo was determined to be from Pleistocene strata, thus rendering both
consistent with biological evolution, the Calaveras skull is a horse of a
different color. It has turned out to be a deliberate hoax. Robert F. Heizer
tells the story.

The Calaveras skull, discovered in 1866, was one of the most notorious
archaeological hoaxes perpetrated in the nineteenth century. J. D. Whitney, an
eminent American geologist, had been appointed in 1860 to carry out a geological
survey of California. A year before the skull came to his attention, Whitney had
published his belief that man, mastodon, and the elephant had coexisted in
California, and, perhaps for this reason, he saw the skull as an interesting bit
of confirmatory evidence. Whitney believed the skull was authentic and
considered it as a reliable example of Tertiary man. Later inquiry by Holmes in
1901 and Hrdlicka in 1907 produced evidence that the skull was a recent one,
first found in a nearby Indian burial ground and then secretly taken into the
mine (probably by one of the workers) and left there as a joke. The skull was
taken by many to be evidence of a fully developed human type dating from the
Pliocene. (p. 177)

Besides the later data, published in 1901 and 1907, which produced evidence that
the Calaveras skull was indeed a hoax and a recent burial in the shaft, Thomas

- page 18 -

Wilson of Harvard University had run a flourine analysis on the skull in 1879.
His results showed it to be recent and intrusive as well. The hoax became so
well known that in 1899 Western humor writer Bret Harte wrote a satirical poem,
"To the Pliocene Skull."

However, as noted by Christopher Weber, creationists are still using Calaveras
Man to show the duplicity of paleoanthropologists. But duplicity seems to be on
the other foot! Weber writes:

In the light of this data, it is strange that standard creationist works like
Henry Morris's Scientific Creationism (p. 177), Robert Kofahl's Handy Dandy
Evolution Refuter (pp. 78-79), and Kofahl's and Segraves's The Creation
Explanation (pp. 120-125) still take Calavaras Man seriously.... On the
other hand, these same authors never let evolutionists forget the Piltdown
hoax. (p. 21)

And isn't it interesting that creationists cite Sir Arthur Keith as a supporting
authority for their claims about the Castenedolo, Olmo, and Calaveras fossils,
but ignore the fact that Keith also accepted Piltdown. Though Keith was truly
the big name in human evolution in his day and showed proper scientific caution
about these fossils, physical anthropology was in its infancy then. It is to be
expected that new sciences often fail to get things right the first time. With
experience, new tools, and new methods, however, physical anthropology has come
a long way in recent years.

Homo Erectus

Another fossil hominid that creationists say is in the "wrong place" for
evolution is the well-established Homo erectus. In this case, they don't try to
claim that the fossils are getting dusty in museum closets because scientists
are conveniently forgetting about them. Creationists instead imply that it is
something of a "club secret" among scientists that Homo erectus doesn't fit
properly into the evolutionary chronology and, in fact, isn't even ancestral to
modern humans. Scientific reports about Homo erectus, creationists contend,
show significant problems. Robert Kofahl declares on page seventy-six of the
Handy Dandy Evolution Refuter: "When carefully compared, these reports show that
Peking Man [Homo erectus pekinensis or Sinanthropus pekinensis] was an animal,
probably a large monkey or baboon, not a man." It would seem from this that
physical anthropologists have no knowledge of human, monkey, and baboon
morphology and have never heard of multivariate analysis or biometrical studies.
(Such an implication renders the creationist comment absurd.) But Kofahl goes on
to say: "Later, Marcellin Boule, international authority on fossil skulls, made
a careful study of the bones and the site and published his conclusion that
Sinanthropus was an

- page 19 -

animal which was eaten by the true men who had manufactured lime at the site."
In regard to this statement, Professor H. Vallois, past director of the Institut
de
Paleontologie Humaine in Paris, France, informs me that Professor Boule wrote
only one paper about the Sinanthropus. It was published in the 1937 issue of
L'Anthropologie (p. 1). In this article, Professor Boule only considers that the
Sinanthropus, a close relative of the Pithecanthropus, belonged to a group which
had many of the characteristics of the big apes but was most certainly human. It
may be noted that Professor Vallois was a close colleague of Professor Boule.

The famous French human paleontologist and Catholic priest, Henri Breuil,
expresses himself as follows:

Sinanthropus kindled fire and did so frequently; he used bone implements and he
worked stone, just as much as the Palaeolithics of the West. In spite of his
skull, which so closely resembles that of Pithecanthropus, he was not merely a
Hominian but possessed an ingenious mind capable of inventing and hands that
were sufficiently master of their fingers to fashion tools and weapons. (Boule
and Vallois, p. 144)

Teilhard de Chardin and the Chinese paleontologist, W. C. Pei, who both worked
the site, concluded:

All the positive facts so far ascertained tend to give us the conviction that
Sinanthropus is the Hominid who kindled fires and dressed the stones in the cave
at Choukoutien. (Boule and Vallois)

But creationists have tried to do more than just make a monkey out of
Sinanthropus (Homo erectus). All this was just a lead-in to their main point
about its
position in the evolutionary chronology. They base their argument on an interpretation
of the relevant fossil finds from Australia.

In the October 1972 Scientific American, a brief note was made of the discovery
in the Kow swamps of Australia of some ten-thousand-year-old cranial
materials. The discussion consisted of three long paragraphs, from which the
creationists quoted forty-three words in Scientific Creationism (Morris, p.
174).

Skulls that were buried a scant ten thousand years ago now suggest that, at a
time when elsewhere in the old world the successor species, Homo sapiens, was
turning from hunting and gathering to agriculture, some Homo erectus genes
lingered on in Australia.

The creationist conclusion from these forty-three words is:

These Homo erectus skulls found in Australia show that modern man had already
been in existence long before, ruling out Homo erectus as a possible ancestor;
he is more likely a decadent descendant.

- page 20 -

This is a classic non sequitur (as well as being a claim that disagrees with
Kofahl's
view that Homo erectus was a monkey or baboon).

The conclusions of the Australian prehistorians in the third paragraph of the
same Scientific American discussion (page forty-eight) was for some reason
overlooked by the authors and editors of Scientific Creationism:

Thorne and Macumber suggest that the overall skull form includes archaic
features that preserve almost unmodified the morphology typical of Homo erectus
fossils from Java, combined with elements of early representatives of Homo
sapiens.... The archaic skulls represent isolated remnants of an even earlier
population. [emphasis added]

It appears, as expected in an isolated continent such as Australia, that some
Homo erectus genes lingered on. This does not say that what lingered on was
Homo erectus. "Ruling out" state the creationists; "isolated remnants" say the
Australian scientists. It appears obvious why the total article was not quoted.

The conclusion reached by Professor Rhys Jones of the Australian National
University is:

Either there were two populations, an ancient archaic one being added to or
partially replaced by a modern one which entered the continent some time before
twenty-five thousand years ago, or the founding population itself showed marked
polymorphism, perhaps due to hybridization in the region of embarkation. The
first solution, which seems the most likely at present, also implies that a
great slab of Australia's prehistory still awaits discovery.

To make certain that I was on the right track and was reading the materials
objectively, I wrote to scientists at the Australian National University in
Canberra, who
subsequently informed me:

The ten-thousand-year-old Kow swamp crania are not H. erectus nor do they quite
fit with the Neanderthal vintage early sapiens skulls from Wadjak and elsewhere
in Southeast Asia. But they are extraordinarily robust and show a number of
archaic features that seem to harken back to an early breeding line going back
through Wadjak to the H. erectus populations of Pleistocene Java.

What we may have with the Kow crania is not a ruling out of Homo erectus as an
ancestor but rather a remnant group showing extreme polymorphism due to
population mixture. The creationist misuse of the sources is typical of their
usual manner in dealing with the evidence for human evolution.

Recent Finds

In the November 1981 Impact, published by the Institute for Creation Research,

- page 21 -

Gary Parker states, ". . . We have evidence that people walked upright before
Lucy was fossilized-the Kanapoi hominid, Castenedolo Man, perhaps even the
Laetoli footprints discovered by Mary Leakey ..." (p. iii). He uses this
material as support for his contention that Lucy could not have been our
ancestor because "people" were around earlier. But let's look at the facts.

The Kanapoi material was discovered on an exposed erosion slope near Telek's
volacano at the south end of Lake Rudolf in East Africa. The find was made by
Dr. Bryan Patterson in 1965 while working with the Harvard University Museum of
Zoology. This hominid discovery consisted of KP 271, a single elbow fragment
(the distal end of the humerus). The specimen has been dated by faunal evidence
and on correlation with Mursi (yellow sands) in Omo Valley at between 4 and 4.5
million years in age. Physical anthropologists are not jumping to any rash
conclusions about this find. In general, the feelings are that the Kanapoi
discovery is too fragmentary to allow much elaboration. Donald Johanson states
in his book, Lucy: The Beginnings of Humankind, that the Kanapoi find is "so
fragmentary, so worn, so lost in the wastes of time" that there is nothing it
can tell us "beyond what logic could have said anyway: that some kind of ape
into hominid was developing in East Africa during that period" (p. 361).

As for the Laetoli footprints, they tend to support evolution and counter the
arguments of those creationists who doubt that Lucy and other Australopithecines
walked upright. Richard Hay and Mary Leakey, writing in the February 1982
Scientific American, noted that the Laetoli footprints date back between 3.5 and
3.8 million years. Lucy has been dated at about 3 million years old. Therefore,
if the footprints at Laetoli in Tanzania, Africa, were made by Australopithecus
afrensis, this merely shows that there was a period of stasis in the evolution
of that hominid type lasting at least five hundred thousand years. There is
nothing strange about that.

The hominid footprints at Laetoli were found in 1977 and 1978. Hay and Leakey
declare:

The best-defined of the footprints are from one centimeter to three centimeters
deep and hav, e clear margins. They show the rounded heel, uplifted
arch, and forward-pointing big toe typical of the human foot.... The hominid
tracks are clear proof that 3.5 million years ago these East African
precursors of early man walked fully upright with a bipedal human gait. This was
at a time when, both in stature and in brain size, the hominids of Africa
were still small by later human standards. (p. 56)

Parker's comments that imply that these footprints must be in the wrong place
for evolution are no more logical than saying that, because my great, great
grandfather walked erect, he could not have been my ancestor. All the Laetoli

- page 22 -

prints do is push back further into time the origin of hominids. When Parker
says "we have evidence," he should note that evidence is the data upon which a
judgment or conclusion can reasonably be based or by which proof or probability
can be established. But the evidence of KP 271 and the Laetoli footprints fail
to lend support to Parker's conclusion that Lucy could not have been our
ancestor.

Conclusion

The creationist interpretations and comments on those human fossils that are
supposedly in the "wrong place" for evolution are nothing less than
pseudoscientific notions based on a need to defend biblical inerrancy. These
notions constitute a collection of outdated information and views, unwarranted
projections, and discarded hypotheses. Put into scientific guise, they do
nothing to shake the "establishment" position that humans are a product of an
evolutionary process. If the creationists had really established the truth of
their numerous statements in the field of paleoanthropology, this indeed would
have been an astonishing upset. And contrary to what creationists may lead
people to believe, any firm evidence they had would have found a welcome place
in the standard scientific journals. As it is, creationists have simply failed
to make a case.